In the New York Times, the actress recounted in detail the tragedy that marked her youth, when her father tried to kill her. "I saw things I shouldn't have seen..."

She grew up in the shadow of a loving mother and an alcoholic father, whom she practically always knew drunk and who regularly beat her mother. They lived in a very secure house, due to the common thefts and assaults in the area. "Every room in our house had a steel door," she explains. "That was the kind of violence we lived in. Our country was on the brink of civil war..."

One evening in 1991, she was fifteen years old and was returning from the cinema with her mother. Her father was out, at his brother's house. Mother and daughter went to his place to get the keys and found the two men extremely drunk. "I ran through the house to go to the bathroom," Charlize Theron recounts, "and my father took it as rudeness, because I hadn't stopped to say hello to everyone. Respect for elders is very important in South Africa. He started getting angry. Like, 'Who do you think you are?' And the anger completely spiraled out of control..."

"I'm going to kill you tonight."

Charlize and her mother sensed the danger. They rushed into their house, followed by the two men. Her father eventually forced his way in. “He fired through the steel doors to get in, making it clear he was going to kill us,” the actress continued. “We knew it was serious, so as soon as he broke through the first gate, my mother ran to the safe to get his gun. She came into my room. We were both holding the door shut with our bodies because there was no lock. He simply stepped back and started shooting through the door. The craziest thing is that not a single bullet hit us… But the message was very clear: ‘I’m going to kill you tonight.’”

Her father shouted that he was going to get a rifle from the safe, at which point her mother decided to leave the room. "She followed my father, who was opening the safe to take out other weapons, and she shot him dead." No charges were filed against her, as the act was considered self-defense.

The very next day, she sent her daughter back to school. “She simply told me, ‘We’re going to move on,’” the actress recounts. “We didn’t have any therapists nearby, so in her mind, the best therapy was to ‘move on’ […] We’ve always been very close,” she continues, speaking of her mother. “But that night changed everything, because in hindsight, once the initial shock had passed, I realized she had saved my life…”

A year later, still encouraged by her mother, Charlize Theron finally left South Africa to take her first steps in modeling in Italy, before trying her luck in Hollywood. She kept this family tragedy hidden for a long time before deciding to share it. "I think it's important to talk about these things, because it allows others not to feel alone," says the star of Mad Max: Fury Road. "I had never heard of a story like that. When it happened to us, I thought we were the only ones." And she concludes: "I'm no longer haunted by it."